Williamina "Minnie" Dean (2 September 1844 – 12 August 1895) was a New Zealander who was found guilty of infanticide and hanged. She was the only woman to be executed in New Zealand. Several other women were sentenced to death, but all of them had their sentences commuted to either life or long duration imprisonment.
Early life
Minnie McCulloch was born in Greenock, in western central Scotland. Her father, John McCulloch, was a railway engineer. Her mother, Elizabeth Swan, died of cancer in 1857. It is unknown when she arrived in New Zealand, but by the early 1860s, she was living in Invercargill with two young children. She claimed she was the widow of a Tasmanian doctor, although no evidence of a marriage has been found. She was still using her birth name, McCulloch.
In 1872, she married an innkeeper named Charles Dean. The two lived in Etal Creek, between Ohai and Lumsden, then an important stop on the route from Riverton to the Otago goldfields. When the gold rush died down, the couple turned to farming, but were soon in dire financial straits. The family moved to Winton, where Charles Dean took up pig farming while Minnie began to earn money by baby-farming: taking in unwanted children in exchange for payment. In an era when there were few methods of contraception, and when childbirth outside marriage was frowned upon, there were many women wishing to discreetly send their children away for adoption, so Minnie Dean did not lack customers. It is believed that she was responsible for as many as nine young children at any one time. She received payment either weekly or in a lump sum.
Infant mortality was a significant problem in New Zealand at this time (as it was estimated to run to about 80 to 100 infants out of 1000 colonial births). As such, a number of children under Dean's care died of various illnesses. In March 1889, a six-month-old child had died of convulsions; in October 1891, a six-week-old baby had perished from cardiovascular and respiratory ailments; and a boy allegedly drowned under her care in 1894 and she hid the body in her garden, arousing further suspicions. A coroner's inquest was held, and Dean was not held responsible for the deaths, due to universally-poor hygiene standards, even at childbirth itself. Nevertheless, the community came to mistrust Dean, and rumours of mistreatment circulated. Additionally, children under Dean's care allegedly went missing without explanation. In the public's mind, this linked Dean to cases of infanticide or baby farming in the United Kingdom and Australia, where women killed children under their care to avoid having to support them. At the time, lax childcare legislation meant that Dean did not have to keep records of the children she agreed to take in, so proving that the children had disappeared was difficult.
Before Dean's trial and execution, four other women had been tried and sentenced to death--Caroline Whitting (found guilty in 1872), Phoebe Veitch (1883), and Sarah-Jane and Anna Flannagan (1891). In each case, these sentences were commuted to life imprisonment; in each case, child murder was the culpable offence. 30 years later, in 1926, Daniel Cooper was also convicted of baby farming and executed for the offence, although his second wife Martha was acquitted. In a broader, international context, Dean's misdeeds may also have been viewed in the same light as late Victorian contemporaries and fellow "baby farmers" such as Amelia Dyer in the United Kingdom (convicted in 1896) and John and Sarah Makin (1893) and Frances Lydia Alice Knorr in New South Wales (1893), as well as previous New Zealand historical instances of ostensibly deliberate child deaths. Certainly, given the proximity of New South Wales, the Makin case featured in New Zealand newspapers during the same period as the Minnie Dean controversy and trial.